King's son speaks at PPL fund-raiser

Bethlehem event nets $6,000 for scholarships for area black students.

Martin Luther King III delivered a speech in the Lehigh Valley on Friday addressing the challenges to civil rights and identifying terrorism as one of America's gravest obstacles.

"I don't think we know or understand how to abolish terrorism yet," King said. "I'm not sure that you can ever abolish terrorism by terrorizing others."

The remarks were delivered before an audience of 325 people at the Holiday Inn-Bethlehem at a fund-raiser for a planned scholarship program by PPL Corp.'s African-American Business Resource Group, a network of support for black employees.

Organizers said $6,000 was raised and that the scholarships would benefit college-bound, African-American high school students.

The eldest son of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. urged his listeners to try to understand the source of terrorism -- although he acknowledged there may not be logic among the fanatical elements of America's enemies.

"You can not make people do things. You have to understand how different cultures work," King said.

On the home front, King decried poverty and the lack of health care in a prosperous America.

"The federal budget this year is $2.4 trillion. What is that? How long would it take to count to $2.4 trillion? And yet we have the audacity to have 35 million living under the poverty level.

Everybody in America ought to have a decent job decent health care," King said.

"African-Americans make 60 cents [on] the dollar what others make. Something is wrong with that," King said. "But we can change that."

King was appointed this month as the chief executive officer of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

Until recently, he served as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization founded by his father.

Among the participants of the program was a group of children from the Caring Place of Allentown, a center for inner-city youths.

They recited King's father's famous "I have a dream speech" by memory to loud applause.